


Never Felt Like Any Blessing

by Cunien



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 02:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1329286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cunien/pseuds/Cunien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gen, hurt!Porthos, mad!Marsac, ShitScared!Aramis, slightly graphic violence.</p><p>Notes: This came out of nowhere today. Could be seen as Aramis/Marsac Aramis/Porthos, but I wrote it more as buddyfic. Whatever floats your boat, my friends.</p><p>'There is a wet, sucking noise, like a cleaver being pulled from a piece of meat - and isn’t that a noise they all know horribly well? - and Porthos crumples like a piece of paper, as though the knife in his side was the only thing holding him up.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Felt Like Any Blessing

“Alrigh’?” he asks, frowning a little at the other occupant of the Bonacieux’s little courtyard. Porthos couldn’t give a damn about the man who left his friend wounded and alone and surrounded by bodies, but for unfathomable reasons Aramis still does give a damn. And so Porthos must, too.

“Forgive me, but I get the impression you don’t much care for me,” Marsac says, jittering on the balls of his feet. He speaks slowly, like he’s having to pull the words up one by one from some deep well inside.

“I don’t. Aramis does,” Porthos states bluntly.

Marsac lifts his eyebrows and smiles quickly in acknowledgement, but there’s something wrong about it, like paper pasted over a crack in a wall. The deep sense of unease that Porthos has been feeling around Marsac since he first showed up quickens and stirs in his belly. No-one lasted long in the Cour de Miracles without a keenly developed sixth sense when it came to the people around them, and Porthos’s uncanny ability to correctly assess a person’s character within a second of meeting them has often been remarked upon by his fellow Musketeers.

Still, the fact remains that Marsac is Aramis’s friend. And though it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, there’s no denying the regard that Marsac obviously has for Aramis. _Even after abandoning him_ , Porthos thinks, viciously.

So for now, he is here in the Bonacieux’s courtyard, making sure that Marsac doesn’t leave, and praying that the others will return soon.

Marsac makes a strangled noise, a little gasp that sounds like pain and fear and an unnameable emotion that turns Porthos’s blood to ice. He pushes himself off the window-ledge he’d been leaning against and crosses to the man.

“Marsac?” he asks, warily. “What’s wrong”

He’s within an arms reach of the man when Marsac looks up, and the wild pain in his eyes, like that of a cornered and wounded animal, takes Porthos’s breath away with a gasp.

*

Seeing Marsac again - someone who Aramis has spent many years convincing himself is dead - has done something strange to him. Of course, it’s not as though that night in Savoy has ever really left him, but year on year the burden has become just noticeably lighter. There’s no such thing as closure with pain like this, he thinks, but at least time and his life here with Porthos and Athos, and now d’Artagnan, has begun to put distance between himself and that grief, like a boat drawing away from a riverbank.

And then Marsac showed up. And the world turned upside down and back again, so quickly that no one else but he noticed.

And now he doesn’t really know what to feel. The others distrust Marsac, but they never really knew him like Aramis did. He was never a brother, as he was to Aramis.

Aramis had almost laughed at the bitter curled lip that Porthos offered when told he was to stay and watch Marsac. It’s plain he neither likes nor trusts the man, so when Athos, d’Artagnan and Aramis step into the Bonacieux’s courtyard and see them there, standing in front of each other - standing so close - he is utterly confused.

To those who did not know them the two men in the courtyard might look like two soldiers, home from battle, drawing a little comfort from each other. Their heads are bowed, Porthos’s chin almost touching Marsac’s hair, his hands gripping the shorter man’s shoulders. It looks oddly….intimate.

Then Porthos sighs, so gently that Aramis will wonder later how he could have heard it, all the way across the courtyard. There is a wet, sucking noise, like a cleaver being pulled from a piece of meat - and isn’t that a noise they all know horribly well? - and Porthos crumples like a piece of paper, as though the knife in his side was the only thing holding him up.

Aramis is running before Porthos hits the floor, skidding to a stop on his knees in front of him. He hears Athos and d’Artagnan shouting, but doesn’t see Marsac hand the blade over to them calmly.

Porthos’s hands are already red, fluttering around the bloody tear in the side of his jacket. “S’not that bad,” he keeps saying, his words a little strained, “Don’t think it’s that bad.” He keeps trying to lift his head, to see, but after a while his neck starts to weaken and he drops it back down to the ground with a dull thud.

Aramis is utterly floored, for an instant that feels like a lifetime, because it _is_ that bad and it’s _Porthos_. This doesn’t feel like all the other times, jokes and scrapes and careful stitches with steady hands. He knows without looking that this is something else, something bad, and oh God this is Porthos, Porthos, Porthos…

He can’t for the life of him remember how to breathe, how he ever managed to get his heart to beat.

“Aramis,” comes a voice beside him, cool and steady. Athos’s hand is a firm pressure on his shoulder, grounding him. “ _Aramis_.”

His eyes flick quickly over to Marsac, who is sitting dead-eyed and still on the ground, hands limp beside him and d’Artagnan’s gun pointed steadily at his head.

Aramis nods once, quick and tight.

“Inside.”

Marsac goes first, d’Artagnan straight behind with the gun still levelled at him. Then Athos and Aramis stagger through with the weight of Porthos slung between him. Moving him has always been a three-man-job at least, but there’s no one else around and they don’t trust taking their eyes, and d’Artagnan’s pistol, away from Marsac for any length of time.

Once inside Marsac is locked unceremoniously in the pantry, which d’Artagnan assures them only has a tiny window and nothing bar the odd jar or bowl to be used as a weapon. Porthos is laid out on the table, the blood pooling around him on the dark wood and dripping steadily onto the scrubbed clean floor of Constance Bonacieux’s kitchen.

*

Hours after Treville and a few Musketeers have taken Marsac to be locked up at the garrison, Aramis opens the door to his cell with hands that haven’t stopped shaking, hands that are lined and ingrained with dried brown blood. It’s under his fingernails and on his uniform, it’s everywhere and Aramis wonders if he will ever be clean again.

Athos gives him a look, and nods once, leaving the two alone. Marsac is shackled and cannot move far from the iron ring in the wall that his chains are fastened to, but Aramis knows with utter certainty that the other man won’t hurt him.

Except he already has hurt him, somewhere vital and deep-down and real.

“Why?” Aramis asks, after a while, and his voice is scratchy and raw.

“Because you were happy. And I couldn’t bear it.”

Marsac is calm and pale now, his eyes glassy and almost devoid of life, and Aramis is struck suddenly with the realisation that Marsac really _has_ been dead, all these years since Savoy. His body didn’t know it yet, but his heart and his soul were utterly lost that night.

There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say. Aramis regards him for a moment, and feels a little of the hollow chill from the other man permeate inside him, into his heart. He moves to the door but turns, his hand on the heavy splintered wood.

“He’s not dead,” he says, over his shoulder. “He’s strong.”

_Stronger than you,_ he thinks, an unspoken coda that Marsac seems to understand. _Stronger than me._

Marsac nods, once.

 


End file.
